Why we built this

Reddit is a company that doesn't moderate Reddit. Around 60,000 unpaid volunteer moderators do, day to day, according to the daily-active-moderator figure Reddit itself disclosed in its 2024 IPO filing. Each of them runs their own subreddit under their own interpretation of rules that can change without notice. Above them sits Reddit's own admin team, who can override any of it: lock a subreddit, remove a moderator, or suspend an account sitewide. When mods pushed back hardest, during 2023's API-pricing blackout, Reddit's response was to start removing moderator teams and its CEO went on record calling protesting moderators "landed gentry."

We're not going to pretend every banned user was in the right. Plenty weren't. But a single subreddit's mod team, or Reddit's own admins, can end your ability to participate in a community you might have spent years contributing to, over a call that's rarely reviewed by anyone outside that decision. Read our blog for the specific, cited history: the 2023 API blackout and what happened to the mods who led it, the bigger ban waves, how account suspensions actually work, and where the appeals process breaks down.

What we're not doing

We're not trying to replace Reddit, scrape Reddit's content, or pretend to be Reddit. Reddit Jail is its own place: a companion comment thread that sits next to a Reddit post's URL, hosted on our own servers, with our own accounts. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Reddit, Inc.

What we are doing

Everyone gets a chance to chime in! Banned, muted, or shadowbanned users get a real place to keep talking about the post that got them in trouble, with a moderation policy you can actually read (see our Community Guidelines), enforced against a short, public list of reasons, not a mood.